Social Democracy Outlook:
June 01, 2024

As we reach mid-year the social democracy project in America is experiencing the same mix of incremental progress, headwinds and outright terrors as were present when I wrote the last of these updates in January. The big political news in the United States is, of course, the upcoming presidential elections. Donald Trump continues to be Donald Trump: that is, he continues to show little respect for democratic norms or the institutions, such as our justice system and courts, that ensure the survival of our democracy and the rule of law. Even after conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, Trump continues to receive widespread support from a hardcore base of socially conservative Americans motivated by culture war issues, wealthy voters and corporate actors whose chief priorities appear to be low taxes and minimal regulation, and an odd lot of independents and ill-informed voters whose motivations are less clear. This latter group, ominously for Democrats’ future, includes significant numbers from demographic segments traditionally thought to be firmly in the Democrat camp: young people, Americans racialized as “Black” and Americans racialized as “Latino.” The most current polls show Trump leading Biden in all but one of the six battleground states that will decide the November outcome.

Facing an electorate largely incapable or unwilling to understand the policy issues at stake, Biden is hampered by a widespread perception that he is a doddering old man and not up to the job either physically or mentally. Beyond this, two issues extraneous to the social democracy project are harming the President’s chances of prevailing in November. One is the war in Gaza, a cause celebre among especially young leftists many of whom may consider Biden’s support for traditional ally Israel reason enough to cast a third-party vote or sit out the election entirely. The other is the nation’s southern border, where even some Democratic local officials have expressed dismay over the admistration’s incapacity to prevent thousands of illegal entries per day. The TSD take: in failing to build a broad coalition around the basic premises of social democracy, instead dealing in a corporatist manner with identity groups with particularist and sometimes competing claims (in this case Americans identifying as “Jewish” and those racialized as “Arab-Americans” and  “Latinos”), the Democratic Party is subject to bearing the brunt of crosswinds on any issue, however extraneous to the core social democracy project, that affects one of the identity groups around which its base is built.

Not that the administration has been inactive in pursuing an expansion of social democracy. In January’s State of the Union address the President laid out some bold proposals to help the average working American, among them a $400 per month tax credit to help qualifying Americans purchase a home and substantive new taxes on the super rich and corporations to address the growing federal deficit. All such initiatives will of course remain merely ideas unless the American public elects a Democratic Congress in November, an unlikely scenario. Some progress is being made, however, in the here and now. The Department of Health and Human Services reported record enrollments for insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, a key plank in American social democracy (and one slated for the cutting board under a prospective Trump administration). Using authority under the landmark infrastructure bill of 2021, Biden continued to push policies designed to expand America’s manufacturing base and to effectuate the nation’s green energy transition, with major initiatives on electric vehicles and chip manufacturing that are yielding concrete results. The Biden EPA, under Administrator Michael Regan, took several key actions to protect the natural environment, among them a total ban on asbestos, a new round of funding ($1 billion) to clean up toxic waste sites under the decades-old Superfund legislation, stricter particulate pollution rules, new tailpipe emission standards and stringent new smokestack requirements for coal-burning power plants. On an issue more controversal on the Left, the administration has signalled support for nuclear energy as a key component in the nation’s journey toward a carbon-free economy. And using his excecutive authority, the President is pursuing all possible means to reduce the student debt load of Americans trapped in punishing load programs.

Many American workers have seen a deterioration in their situation, and this is likely no small part of the explanation for Biden’s low poll numbers. Accumulated inflation of nearly 21 percent since 2020 has significantly increased the cost of living for the average American, and those seeking entry into the housing market face even worse news, with housing prices up almost 20% in the last year alone and mortgage interest rates at two-decade highs. A Harvard study finds that renters are in equally bad shape, with half of renter households facing unaffordable monthly bills. On the bright side, unemployment is relatively low, at 4 percent; though this still represents between six and seven million people seeking employment in an unemployment insurance regime which fails to adequately replace lost income; while many more are working for wages which leave them in a chronic state of precarity. (In the last year, meanwhile, CEO compensation increased 12.6% to an average of $16.3 million, while the wage and benefit package of the average private-sector worker rose only 4.1%, just keeping up with inflation.) A significant and much overdue step was taken by the Biden Labor Department to protect coal miners from pneumonconiosis, commonly known as black lung disease: the new rule sharply decreases permissible exposure to cyrstalline silica, the particles responsible for the illness. Finally, the Biden Federal Trade Commission issued a ruling banning no-compete contract clauses; these provisions, increasingly applied to minimum wage workers, were faulted by the FTC for suppressing competition and wages and impeding worker mobility and advancement.

There was major action in two states concerning the  drug war, with Oregon taking a step back—hopefully a temporary one—from its recent decriminalization of virtually all drug possession and Wes Moore, Maryland’s Democratic governor, pardoning 132,000 convictions for simple marijuana possession. In policing, the New York City  Council’s How Many Stops Act requires officers to document all investigative stops, including both the purpose of the stop and the age, gender and race of the person detained; the measure provides a vital tool in evaluating the legality of police stops and any potential profiling or bias. New York City, under its "broken windows" policing model of the 2000s, was notorious for hundreds of thousands of unjustified "stops" and "frisks," with implications of racial profiling (see, on this site, "Terry v Ohio, Stop & Frisk, and the Making of the American Police State").

California was at the forefront of two major initiatives in education. Most significantly, the state will make free pre-K available to all 4-year-olds resident in the state beginning in 2025 while Los Angeles County has banned cell phones and the use of social media in County schools.

On the international front, Mexico has elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a protegé of outgoing president Manuel Lopez Obrador and a member of the party he founded, Moreno, president in a landslide victory. She is expected to follow a social democratic line in governing our southern neighbor. In France, meanwhile, social democracy is under threat, with the far-right nationalist party of Marine Le Pen, Rassemblement National (National Union), looking dangerously close to winning parliamentary elections hastily called by President Macron after a governing majority loss to RN in last month’s elections for the European Union Parliament.

Finally, in a hopeful sign for a possibly saner future, a letter addressed to world leaders meeting at January’s  Davos Summit from over 250 billionaires and multimillionaires demanded that governments begin to tax the exorbitant fortunes accumulated by the super-rich in recent decades, citing the need to combat "economic, societal and ecological" instability. The TSD says, “Amen.”